Ultrabook are rumored to be hitting our shopping carts in Q3 and their appeal other than being Ultra thin is their sub $1000 price point. According to sources over at Digitimes, actual production costs render the hope of hitting this price point impossible.

ASUS & HP are supposed to be holding down the initial launch of the Ultrabook category. However, the 11.6-inch UX21 and 13.3-inch UX31 from ASUS are now rumored to be hitting the $1000 – $1600 price point when they are released in late September or early October. We’ve previously heard about the UX21 at Computex but we haven’t heard of the UX31 mentioned by the sources over at Digitimes. It seems likely that they are also working on a 13.3″ Ultrabook, but a price point upward of $1600 seems out line for the intentions of this new category.

The reason behind the higher than expected price point is because yield rates for panels and key components are still lower than originally expected and therefore production costs are relatively high.

Since this is a new product category, its not surprising that ASUS isn’t all in and is going to test the waters before throwing down a huge production run. So it looks like we might have to wait until 2012 after they see how early sales for the real price points of Ultrabooks, or not, the whole thing could flop! I doubt it though, Macbook Air for the PC world, i’d bet the ranch on that!